The zombie Half-Pipe lacks legs but can travel by skateboard, seeking alien brains in Teenage Zombies.

I suppose there are people who can resist a video game that pits evil alien brains against teenage zombies, but I am not one of them. For me, few things are more intriguing than a puzzle game for the Nintendo DS entitled Teenage Zombies: Invasion of the Alien Brain Thingys.

The premise is simple. Aliens, who are nothing but big brains with eyes, have invaded earth. Overcoming all of earth’s defenses, the planet’s hopes now reside with three teenage zombies who, tempted by the smell of all those alien brains, have arisen from their graves in search of a tasty brain dinner.

The zombies have different abilities, and the player must frequently switch from one to another to progress through the game. Lori “Lefty” Lopez can jump to platforms the other two can’t reach. The legless Zack “Half-Pipe” Boyd travels by skateboard and is able to squeeze through small passages. Finnigan “Fins” Magee is the oddest zombie, as he has somehow grown tentacles that allow him to crawl straight up walls and shinny along ropes. He is also the most useful when attacked by aliens, as he can stiffen his tentacles into spikes.

The zombies shuffle wordlessly through nicely designed sewers and office buildings looking for yummy brains. Each can acquire temporary powers. Fins, for example, can eat garbage and then spit it out as acid, which can be used both to kill brains and to dissolve steel grates.

Since the zombies have no personality, the story sequences, laid out like panels in a comic book, follow the attempts of the smug alien leader, the Big Brain, to stop the zombie pack. These interludes are mildly amusing, although they don’t really live up to the premise’s potential.

The game primarily involves figuring out how to get from one point to the next. At times you will have to find and kill a special mind-controlling brain in order to clear your path of enslaved, very dangerous humans. Other times you will have to deal with alien-occupied turrets that can be tricked into shooting brains by the use of soap bubbles.

Players will also come across various minigames in which Half-Pipe must skateboard up a ramp to destroy brains floating above or Fins must climb up pipes while avoiding electrical shock. While enjoyable, these games serve no purpose in the main game; you get no special items nor do you unlock any bonus content.

While eating the brains of downed foes restores your health, at times swarms of aliens will still manage to kill you. Unfortunately, the game saves your progress only at checkpoints at the beginning of levels. Often you will die in a tricky section near the end of a level and have to redo, tediously, the exact same series of actions to reach that tricky point, where you may well die again. It is a huge irritant.

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An alien brain in Teenage Zombies.

Zombies is not perfect. The puzzles could be more challenging, the story could be a bit funnier and the game could be longer. Still the game has zombies and evil alien brains, and for that it simply cannot be faulted.

Season 2 of the episodic adventure series Sam & Max also has had its share of zombies and alien spacecraft, along with giant killer robots, mysterious portals, a demon-possessed Santa Claus and mariachis. Many of these oddities return for this season’s exhilarating final episode, Sam & Max Episode 205: What’s New, Beelzebub? (I don’t know why they call it episode 205; it is just the fifth episode of the second season.)

“If this doesn’t work I’ll see you in hell,” Max said at the end of the fourth episode, Chariots of the Dogs. As episode 5 begins, the freelance police Sam and Max — an anthropomorphic dog and rabbit — find themselves at the entryway to hell. Since the entryway turns out to be located just under their office, the pair could just go home, but that wouldn’t be much of a game.

Hell turns out to be a bland corporation where every day is Monday and the clock always shows 4:59. Rabbit Max is disappointed, having expected more acid baths and karaoke bars.

Sam and Max soon discover that they have their own wing in hell, filled with dead enemies, friends and casual acquaintances undone in past episodes. Each lives in a small personal hell. A chef becomes the sidekick on a cooking show for rats while a child-hating Santa Claus who likes his job because he has to see children only one day out of the year is hounded by kids. One tormented soul, forced to stand on stage naked in front of his mother and his therapist, says, “It’s like being in the bad place people go where it’s really hot.” To which Max replies, “Tampa?”

The Sam & Max series has always been strange, but Beelzebub is easily the weirdest episode to date, filled with surreal moments like Death incarnate singing into a karaoke machine and a lumbering monster working as a stripper at a bachelor party.

The game’s puzzles are also the oddest of the series, requiring a sort of dream logic to solve. (You need to ask yourself: what would you do if you were a talking dog trying to save the soul of Santa Claus and a DeSoto car?) The second season has increased the difficulty with each episode, and Beelzebub has some really tricky puzzles.

Episode 5 feels not so much like the end of season 2, since most of this season’s mysteries were wrapped up in the excellent time travel-themed fourth episode, but rather like a grand finale to the first two seasons. Characters from almost every episode to date have wound up in hell. After two seasons, Sam and Max’s adventures have destroyed most of the street they live on and wreaked huge changes in the lives of those around them, who wind up married, in the deepest pit of hell or stripped of their sustaining insanity.

Having run through zombies, child stars, cults, time travel, therapy, virtual reality and several kitchen sinks, Sam and Max will need a whole new set of unlikely props for season 3. I know that when the sequel to Teenage Zombies comes out it will have more zombies and more alien brains, but I cannot begin to imagine what Sam and Max have in store for its audience. Whatever it is, I will not be able to resist it.

E-mail: herold@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on , on page C6 of the National edition with the headline: Zombies Eat Brains, Santa Hates Children (Don’t Worry, It’s All for Games). Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe